| “It gave me so much trouble,” Alice Munro once wrote, referring to her short story “Amundsen.” For readers, at least, the struggle isn’t perceptible. “Amundsen,” which The New Yorker published a year before Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, flows without apparent effort, recounting an icy but significant season in the life of a young teacher. In the distant background, the Second World War is grinding to an end; closer to home, it’s a time of rationed meat and underheated buildings. At the sanatorium where the narrator teaches, she catches the eye of an older doctor, “evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.” There’s also a sweet, needy student named Mary, busy mourning the death of her equally youthful best friend.
Munro, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety-two, imbues “Amundsen” with some of her signature touches, yet the ending—as in so many of her works—still comes as a surprise. Set in the author’s native Canada, the story leaps forward in time, recasting the main action through the eyes of a protagonist who, like Munro’s reader, grows wiser as we move along. “We don’t so much read Alice’s stories as live through them,” The New Yorker’sfiction editor, Deborah Treisman, wrote shortly after Munro received the Nobel. “They can be exhausting and enervating; they can leave us fragile, our senses heightened; they can leave us satisfied, thrilled.” “The saddest part,” she continued, “is that they leave us at all.”
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